With event cancellations and postponements occurring throughout March, there has been a long wait for sporting events to return across the world – although the US announced that states could lift lockdown measures before those in Europe were considering the same, delays to these sporting events getting underway continues as concerns around player safety continue. Fortunately, there may be some good news on the horizon as some lessons may be learned from the restart of the Bundesliga soccer league in Germany, and the gearing up for the same to happen in Italy, Spain, and the UK as we head toward June.
Despite a number of players testing positive for a few teams in the German league, the first eight games were played over the weekend to great success as there were no follow up issues that were made immediately obvious – the following weeks have plenty of games scheduled as up to sixteen games per week are set to take place to ensure the remainder of the season is played out to completion – as the players had already taken two or three months off during the lockdown measures there’s no doubt they were eager to get back to it, fans will have to wait a while longer yet however as it’s expected these ‘ghost’ games will continue for the foreseeable future as stadiums will remain closed – when they do open again, it’s fully expected they will do so at a limited capacity until bigger steps are taken to reduce any risk of infection during the spread of the coronavirus – without stadiums filling however there are risks to the smaller teams who rely on ticket sales and physical event attendance to stay afloat, but until there are efforts made to manage this those smaller teams will need to rely on any support given to them over the comings months until more news is given to when regular schedules will continue.
(Image from variety.com)
This could spell good news for American sporting events, however, as success here could pave the way for others to follow. Combat sports has already done so after three successful events have been held in the past week – this has helped business outside of the sport directly too as betting and non gamstop casinos are commonplace and these events had been reported to be the most bet events in UFC history – if this and the European sporting counterparts are any measure to base success off then it may not be long until some of the favourites in MLB, MLS, NBA, or NFL get back underway again. As it stands now, none of these have any expected date in which they’ll see a return – there have been a lot of rumblings within the MLB on how a return could be found from ideas to moving the league to Japan to splitting the teams by state for two smaller leagues – a tentative date has been put forward for July, but that could of course change if current numbers stay the way the way.
